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Deux mélodies, FP162

Recordings

Graham Johnson is simply the greatest living authority on French song; an artist whose innate feeling for the music is combined with prodigious scholarship. Following his many wonderful recordings in Hyperion’s French Song Edition, Johnson turns t ...» More

This is the first of two small songs written in September 1956—the second of these, Nuages, is a setting of Laurence de Beylié. In honour of the eightieth birthday of the soprano Marya Freund, a close colleague of his youthful years, Poulenc returned to the Apollinaire collection that had begun his song-writing career. He chose a deliciously apposite verse for someone (himself surely) who could scarcely believe how the years of his life (1918–1956) had slipped away—slowly nibbled by the mouse of time. In my own experience, having first performed this song long before the age of twenty-eight, there was a distinctly Poulencian melancholy in returning to it for this recording, well over three decades later.

I saw shining in a corner of my past life, a memory that was no longer mine. Its father was time its mother a guitar that played on wandering dreams. Their child fell into my hands and I put him in an oak tree. A bird took care of him now he sings. How to find his father again, veiled with wind, and how to gather the tears of his mother to give him a name. In the passing of a cloud we shall see eternity appear pursuing time. At this point all is written.

The poet of this slender song is Laurence de Beylié (1893–1968). It was sent to the composer in typescript by a friend. He did not know Beylié personally; she was hardly a well-known writer, and Poulenc corresponded with her without, it seems, meeting her. The song was dedicated to an American singer, Rose Dercourt-Plaut, whom Poulenc was fond of (as such she merited the dedication of course) but the LP he made with her, rather too late in her career, is not the composer’s most glorious legacy. The song has a pleasing gentleness in its unwinding harmonic meanderings, a feast of sequences which he claimed (in JdmM) were inspired by Liszt’s first Valse oubliée, as divinely played by Horowitz. The song is prophetic of the style of the three late sonatas for wind instruments (flute, clarinet, oboe) and piano.

I saw shining in a corner of my past life, a memory that was no longer mine. Its father was time its mother a guitar that played on wandering dreams. Their child fell into my hands and I put him in an oak tree. A bird took care of him now he sings. How to find his father again, veiled with wind, and how to gather the tears of his mother to give him a name. In the passing of a cloud we shall see eternity appear pursuing time. At this point all is written.